MUMBAI: Glitches plagued the first-year junior college (FYJC) centralised admission process (CAP) portal for the second consecutive day on Friday, forcing the state education department to once again extend the deadline, till 6pm on Monday, to fill and lock parts 1 and 2 of the online admission form for regular round 1.Day 1’s snags had prompted the department to extend the deadline till Saturday.High server load caused widespread downtime on Friday, leaving thousands of aspirants and their parents stranded in front of blank screens.Explaining the cause for the website crashes, Mahesh Palkar, director of secondary and higher secondary education, said, “There were two links on the homepage which were directing visitors to several different pages for each college. This led to users spending way more time on the portal than anticipated, which ultimately crashed the system once too many people were online simultaneously.”To resolve the issue, the education department has modified the system. It will now take the applicant to a scanned PDF, where they can view all the necessary college information without putting any pressure on the digital infrastructure, said Palkar. “In addition to this, we have reinforced the website to seamlessly handle the added visitor traffic.”Gangaram Suryavanshi, a parent, expressed deep frustration over the website crash. “My daughter had been trying since Friday morning to lock her documents but the website was down the whole day. This whole ordeal has caused great stress to all of us”.Mahendra Ganpule, former vice president of Maharashtra Principals Association, said the authorities fail to grasp the intense fear and anxiety that such technical failures cause in the minds of young students and their parents. He said it was a huge disappointment that the education department could not keep a website up and running smoothly when it was most critically required.Students who are allotted colleges in round 1 will have from May 29 noon till 6pm on June 3 to confirm admissions by physically going to the colleges and locking their seats. A list of vacant seats for the second round of admissions will be released on June 6.
